Mohammed Abd Alwasi

Mohammed Abd Alwassi is an Iraqi performance artist whose work explores the collective and personal traumas caused by war, hunger, and identity-based violence. Trained at the Babylon School of Fine Arts, he uses the body, everyday objects, social media, and individual memory as raw materials for a deeply engaged art.
His works, often brutal and uncompromising, aim to transform elements of everyday life—whether linked to culture, identity, or the past—into symbolic acts of resistance. Rejecting any aestheticization of trauma, he conceives of performance as an anthropological tool: a means of thinking, of questioning, of bearing witness.
His first significant work, Food Table on My House Roof (2015), mingled memories of childhood famine and contemporary violence through a poignant staging of plates of bullets and bread tied with barbed wire. Since then, he has developed a body of work in which artistic action becomes a cry, an alert, a mirror held up to an Iraqi society confronted with the absurdity and tragedy of its recent history.
 

Training

• 2016 – Master of Fine Arts (Painting Department), College of Fine Arts, University of Babylon, Iraq

• 2012 – Bachelor of Fine Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of Babylon, Iraq

• 2007–2008 – Studies in Visual Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of Babylon, Iraq

 

Collective performances

• 2016 – Al Karadah, collective performance, Baghdad, Iraq

• 2016 – Massacre Every Day, in collaboration with artist Mohammad Al Maamoory, Babylon, Iraq

 

Individual performances

• 2016 – Car Bomb, performance, Babylon, Iraq

• 2015 – Food Table on My House Roof, performance on the roof of his house, Babylon, Iraq

 

Publications

• 2015 – Composite Shapes in Modern Painting, published by Dar Al Radwan, Amman, Jordan

 

"Art as Memory, Resistance and Cultural Archaeology" exhibition in Paris 2025

 

Mohamed Abdul Wasi is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose work wanders through drawing and performance art, exploring the deep scars left by war, exile, and the sense of loss of identity. With a master's degree in visual arts, he has been preparing for over a decade a committed body of work in which the body serves memory and denunciation. With his exhibition, his new series presented in Paris, Mohamed takes a conceptual and artistic turn. He introduces a new painting technique, not based on the brush but on a thick and textured movement of color "pulling." The compositions are constructed by immense, plain spaces, a harsh horizon, and a diminutive, almost erased hero, as if crushed by the size of the background. This staging gives life to a meditation on the vulnerability of the individual in the face of history, collective memory, and state violence. Each work references archaic or contemporary symbols, chosen for their power to resonate with the Iraqi collective unconscious. These elements are transformed into memory triggers, fragments of a fractured but living national narrative.